During the fall of 2019, the chaotic American political landscape was charged with scandal, debate, and accusations. As a result, students would often bring local and national politics into the authors' high school English language arts (ELA) classes. Instead of ignoring the students' heated debates in the classroom, the authors decided to embrace them and create a two-week drama-oriented campaign project. Sixty students across three sections of tenth-grade Honors English role-played fictional characters (from works read in class) in dramatized political debates, in an effort to win a fictional election in which students would vote to decide which character would be the best leader. Using real-world political issues as springboards, students acted as literary characters within student-created video commercials and face-to-face debates. The goal was to cast the classroom as a safe space for students to engage with the current political world, to make "the classroom a real-life laboratory for social and academic learning" (Chesler and Fox 12). In doing so, the authors saw how the elements of drama facilitated students' learning about characters, political issues, and themselves.